"Nativity" Producer: Go See This Film, Or the Entire Religious Film Genre Gets It!

Interesting marketing technique:

Hollywood will not make any more religious films unless Christians go and see The Nativity Story in large numbers

That’s the view of its producer, Marty Bowen

HOLLYWOOD, CA (ANS) -- Marty Bowen, producer of The Nativity Story which came in fourth in the weekend box office in the United States, is concerned that Hollywood will not make anymore religious films unless Christians now go and see the movie in large numbers.

Despite many good reviews, New Line’s The Nativity Story, the story of Christ’s birth, only took in $8 million in the United States from 3,183 locations to come in fourth, while, for the third week in a row, the No. 1 and No. 2 films remain Warners' Happy Feet and Sony's Casino Royale, respectively. Buena Vista's Déjà Vu also remained unchanged from its third place finish last week, netting an additional $11 million.

In an interview with ANS, Marty Bowen said he was disappointed with the fact that the movie only came in fourth.

“I thought it was incredibly disheartening for a variety of different reasons, not the least of which is you hear this common lament from moviegoers that America feels like Hollywood has lost touch with what they want to see. People feel like there is too much violence in movies and too much disrespect towards the family.

“Now finally a Hollywood studio has stepped up and put their money where their mouth is and has committed to making and releasing a movie, not on a couple of screens but rather on a very big very large fashion – more than three-thousand screens around the country -- and giving the audience what they say they want and yet that sense of urgency in that audience isn’t there to go and see it.

“What is disappointing is you hear people talk about how we can make movies better but if you don’t go see them when they are presented to you, Hollywood’s never going to do it again. And that’s what is frustrating to me because I changed careers to make movies that would inspire people and if there’s not a business for it, and I can’t find a studio to make the movies that I want to make, then that’s disappointing.”

Bowen, who was formerly an agent, went on to say, “Hollywood hasn’t made a Biblical film like this for decades. The Passion Of The Christ was one man’s journey and he [Mel Gibson] did a phenomenal job.

“I think what happens in a movie like this is that people say, ‘I’ll get to see the movie when I get around to it.’ What they don’t understand is that this is a business. These theater owners have a lot of demand for their screens and if a movie does not perform well on December 1st, despite the fact that it is the reason for this holiday season -- it’s the Christmas story -- it might not make it to December 25th, and that angers me.

“It just really saddens me that a movie that’s about the birth of Jesus may not be in theaters when that celebration of that birth takes place. And that’s really disappointing.

“People don’t seem to realize that when a studio commits tens of millions of dollars to make a movie they expect an audience to go see it; and if they don’t see it soon they’ll never be around to see it later.

When asked if he had a message to American Christians, he replied, “There needs to be a sense that, if what you want is to see films that are about faith and family and you want to light a fire under your neighbors to be inspired to live the life that you feel like is fulfilling to you, then you need to support films that have a similar message. If you don’t then you need to be ok with the idea that next year at the box office there’s going to be a movie about some guy cutting people’s throats around a Christmas tree.

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(emphasis added)